In eleventh grade, I got pancakes with Dan Savage at a Perkins in Berea, Ohio. He was in town to give a talk at Baldwin Wallace College about sex education, and to answer undergraduates’ questions in his patented wry, sardonic way.
This was before the days of the Savage Love Podcast, before his MTV show, before the It Gets Better Project, before the Russian Vodka ban, before his marriage book, but after he re-defined Santorum. He was known in certain circles of alternate mag readers and precocious teenagers, but the average person did not recognize his now-infamous acronyms. GGG. DTMFA. His speaker fees must have been an order of magnitude less than they are now.
During the talk Savage absolutely killed, but after the show he crumpled into an exhausted, jet-lagged heap. A few of us approached him. My friend made a joke about how she’d lost her Monroe labret on the way to his talk, but that it had been worth it. He laughed. Up close, his eyes were slightly bloodshot, and away from the podium he had lost all will to perform.
Four of us were slated to accompany Mr. Savage to a post-talk dinner. Two college students, and two high school students. We waited in an awkward huddle near the Baldwin Wallace auditorium doors while Dan pried himself away from a few more fans.
“Is my escort in the hotel room?” he joked as he approached us. He’d just gotten off the plane right before the talk, he added, and was ready to crash, but he humored us.
We asked if he wanted something to eat, and he said that yes, he was fucking starving. We rattled off the available options. Denny’s. Friendly’s. Max and Erma’s. Perkins. Pizza Hut.
“Let’s go to fucking Perkins, I guess,” he said, laughing, a little pleased at just how pathetic our Cleveland suburb was. “Let’s get some fucking pancakes.”
He might not have even been serious. If we’d given him the option of going back to the room, he would have probably jumped at it. I was too naive to get the joke; I thought he actually had an escort waiting for him in the hotel room, as part of his compensation.
We shuffled into the restaurant and gathered around a table with a worn nylon tablecloth and cracked plastic chairs. It was just Dan, two students from the college’s Gay-Straight Alliance, and the two of us from the local high school, a boy named Erik and me.
Erik and I were the President and Vice President, respectively, of our school’s Student Equal Rights Coalition, which had been an easy feat since we were the founders of the group and the only two regular members. Our reward for fighting against the school’s nonsensical abstinence-only sex-ed policy was that we’d been invited to eat with Dan Savage. I was floored when I heard. It didn’t turn out how I’d expected.
At that age, Dan Savage was my hero, and I fantasized that we’d hit it off. I thought I would say exactly the right cunty-snarky thing and he’d take me under his surprisingly muscular wing, bring me up and teach me to be a bitchy, ironical writer and sexual-ethics pedant.
I thought, too, that I could make Savage into the kind of writer I wanted him to be in return. I imagined I would take him to task for saying asexuality didn’t really exist (a belief he held at the time but has since renounced) and tell him to stop using the word “pussy” as an insult. In return, he’d bequeath me all the secrets of performing a proper blowjob, or something.
In reality, I sat beside Erik and dumbly chewed my pancakes, watching Dan while the college students chatted with him. Dan leaned over his plate and ate and said relatively little. Now, I recognize the weary, effortful quality of his conversation, and I know it’s exactly the kind of thing I would do if I were dying of sleep deprivation, hunger, and boredom. He was tired, he’d done his work, and he was being grilled by dumb nineteen-year-olds who barely read his column, but he was still trying to he nice to them.
The college students asked some straightforward questions about kink and non-monogamy, the likes of which even a cursory read of Savage’s column would have answered. Erik did not know Dan’s writing at all, and said even less than I did.
Of the four of us, I was most familiar with Dan’s work. My friends and I read his column every week, huddled together over a copy of Cleveland Scene magazine, flipping past the escort ads for the telltale Savage Love header and byline. We read him devotedly for years. Having no formal sex education, he was the best we had access to.
In health class, we were forced to watch a local Christian organization perform skits and pressure us into signing virginity pledges. The Christian actors were early twenty-somethings with desperate grins and little plastic treasure chests with their organization’s name printed on the front: Operation Keepsake.
We each received a treasure chest, and were asked to imagine it represented our virginity. The members of Operation Keepsake used a series of red solo cups filled with water and a few drops of red food dye to demonstrate how rapidly STIs spread through sexual contact. We were shown grotesque photos of advanced stages of syphilis and chlamydia and not told such conditions were curable.
The girls were separated from the boys and we were told about how our purity was a special, easily tarnished gift, and that if we had sex with even one boy, it was actually the equivalent of having sex with dozens of people, through some weird transitive property involving a complex bracketed chart. A few girls asked about STI transmission during lesbian intercourse and were maligned openly for it. At the end of the two-week-long session, we were all lined up and presented with a virginity pledge to sign. I refused, along with quite a few others, including a pregnant girl who was carrying an animatronic fetus around in a plastic carrier, as homework for her Life and Family class.
Erik and I tried to arrange for Planned Parenthood to visit our school and dispense actual information about safe sex and contraception, but this was unequivocably blocked by the school’s administration. This same administration once sent us home for wearing shirts printed with slogans like “I Identify as Gay,” “I Identify as Bisexual,” and “I Identify as Asexual” on National Coming Out Day. The principal said the shirts would incite violence.
So my friends and I turned to Savage Love. From Dan, we learned which STIs were communicable by skin contact and which ones were preventable by condom. We learned that herpes can linger in the body for years before causing an outbreak, and that most people get it anyway, and that while it’s not curable, it’s not a huge deal, and certainly not a reason to laugh at someone in AP History with obvious facial scabs. We learned how to prepare for anal sex, if we were interested in it.
We learned plenty of terms even comprehensive sex ed doesn’t cover: bear, adult baby, cuckold, cuckqueen, vore, sounding. We learned that many women fake orgasms. We learned that oral sex comes “standard” in a relationship, and that any man or woman who refused to perform oral on a giving partner should be returned immediately to the lot.
Years have passed and I remain a Savage listener, albeit one with considerable reservations. I have listened to every episode of his podcast, read the full archives of his column all the way back to the early nineties. I have read most of his books, and even made a visit to his childhood home in northern Chicago using the address he provided in The Commitment. His snarky, spare, punchy writing style has greatly informed my own. I love the guy. But I know he’s a dick.
Dan gets a lot of flack these days for dispensing problematic nonsense. He’s been maligned for using terms like “tranny,” “retard,” and “pussy” in a pejorative sense. He supported the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. He tells women that they have to accept their boyfriends’ porn usage, no matter the circumstances. He blamed the passage of Prop 8 in California in part on “black homophobia;” conspicuously, almost every caller on his podcast is white.
I’ve been able to witness his slow, sometimes hesitant evolution over the years. He doesn’t use “tranny” or “retard” or “pussy” anymore, and hasn’t in years. While he once believed asexuality and male bisexuality to be nearly nonexistent, he doesn’t anymore, and has apologized numerous times for making ignorant comments about both those identities. Nowadays he often brings experts onto his show to smooth out his areas of ignorance.
But he’s flawed. Sometimes he says provocative things thoughtlessly. For that, he gets glitter-bombed and loudly criticized, and he often deserves it. Savage will often find a way to make a genuine apologize and improve on many of these issues, though he always seems to find new mistakes to make.
Savage will never be for everybody. He’s still pretty clueless on trans issues, and his brash,“edgy” Gen-X prattle can grate on a lot of people. But while I understand these limitations, I will always be indebted to him. I’ll always love the guy. And for a certain breed of hapless, sexually inexperienced teenager, I still believe Dan Savage is a great source of information, because he so effortlessly blends information with discussions of ethical dilemmas, while remaining wryly entertaining the entire time.
In person, Dan was not the rip-roarious high-energy iconoclast he was on paper. He could perform and provoke even while drunk with tiredness, but he could not entertain a gaggle of bright-eyed teenagers at dinner.
I owe him a lot. I owe him for every STI and sexual injury I’ve avoided, for every sex toy I’ve ever bought. Not because he’s an ideal sex educator or social justice advocate or even an ideal dinner partner. But because he’s a hell of a lot better than Operation fucking Keepsake, and at age seventeen, those were my only options.
Tags: abstinence-only sex education, dan savage, how were the pancakes though, i identify as you, pancakes
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I really liked this. I’m a pretty big fan of Savage Love, and it’s taught me a whooooole lot about sex that I probably wouldn’t have otherwise learned. Dan’s got some issues, and he clearly formed a lot of his opinions and terminology pretty young and is slow to change, and he deserves to be called out for the things that don’t fly anymore. On the other hand, I find people who are vehemently anti-Dan to be kind of missing the point. He’s a personality, who says stuff he shouldn’t, but says a whole lot more stuff that no one else (until recently maybe) was really talking about so openly, and that can be a gateway to more advanced thinking on sex and identity and all that.
Not too surprised he wasn’t jazzed about eating pancakes with teens, though. Meeting your idols is always so weird.
Absolutely. He’s very far from perfect, but he’s done a hell of a lot of good.
I had never thought about how much of my sex ed came from Dan Savage until now!
Yeah, I moved to Dan from Loveline with Adam and Drew, which I listened to pretty much nightly in middle and early high school. I learned a TON from those guys about the basics–how you can and cannot get pregnant, etc–but as an adult it turns out they are both the actual worst (and, relevant to my interests, have some really negative opinions about BDSM).
Dan was an ENORMOUS step in the right direction for me when it comes to sex ed stuff, but of course I think and hope that kids these days have even better options.
Doesn’t someone with an authoritative voice carried farther than anyone else actually have a greater obligation to avoid saying stupid / harmful shit?
Yes, totally – which is why I said that he absolutely should be called out/taken to task for his problematic statements. I think, to his (somewhat) credit, he has learned and responded to some criticisms, while being disappointingly slow/nonresponsive with others, which obviously isn’t great.
So good! Yeah, I have such a complicated relationship with him. On one hand, I love that he’s allowed for there to be a voice for a whole range of relationship and sex models (especially now that he brings in experts when he doesn’t know what he’s talking about). On the other, I always felt like the idea of GGG came with a hidden “…or else” and it sits weird with me.
Yeah, the whole GGG thing kind of seems to sit in opposition to my preferred idea of ‘it’s my body and I have a right to be comfortable in/with it.’.
Totally. Obviously, in any relationship with someone you trust–or honestly, just whenever you decide–there will be times where you do things because another person wants to and you decide that you can try, even if you’re apprehensive. And that should only be when you’re comfortable and you’ve made that decision, not when someone has guilted you into it with this threat of not being GGG enough, which is more of the tone I get from him.
Interesting. I’ve never thought that being GGG came with “or else…” or guilt. To me, it’s about being open-minded and not shaming others for having kinks/fetishes. Which is not a message that we get from anywhere else (or, at least, wasn’t coming from anywhere else when I was 18).
I think the idea of GGG is very much open minded and not shaming and totaly necessary in a society that’s all too quick to shame people for their kinks. But I think Savage has the way of shaming people who aren’t comfortable with some stuff. Like the way the author describes says “We learned that oral sex comes ‘standard’ in a relationship” when listening to Savage.
Basically, everyone’s GGG boundaries are different, and Savage tends to advocate for certain boundaries and not others.
GGG isn’t “do everything I want or else.” Dan posted this great definition of it that a commenter provided:
“Our social Puritanism throws all its weight behind the least kinky, least libidinous partner, and the other person just has to suck it up. What’s worse, the least kinky, least libidinous partner often feels they’re entirely in the right by not budging at all, ever. (…)
GGG tries to undo that Puritan nonsense and get back the default rule of relationships: communicate and compromise. That doesn’t mean everything is on the table, just like not everything is on the table in all other aspects of the relationship. If my idea of a fun vacation is scuba diving in Australia and my fiancee is flat-out terrified of water, she doesn’t have to be “GGG” and jump in. If I decide I want to quit my job and sponge off our parents, she doesn’t have to be “GGG” and accommodate that. Same with sex: reasonable requests should be communicated, considered, and compromised on. Outlandish shit can be rejected out of hand.”
So what it means is not that you should do everything your partner wants to, so much as that sex is something that matters and should be taken into account just like everything else that’s accepted as “important” is. I think that’s the most important message. I mean, why would you want to be with someone who isn’t sexually compatible with you?
http://www.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2012/03/…
The girls were separated from the boys and we were told about how our purity was a special, easily tarnished gift, and that if we had sex with even one boy, it was actually the equivalent of having sex with dozens of people, through some weird transitive property involving a complex bracketed chart.
I’m never quite sure if I have a horrible memory, a tendency to repress unpleasantness, or a combination of the two, but. . . wow. Forgot about that dumb bracket.
I think yours is an incredibly important point, and well-stated.
But I will say that I was temporarily stymied/distracted by “carrying an animatronic fetus around in a plastic carrier.” Was this, like, your school’s version of a scarlet “A” (I’m pretty sure an ever-expanding belly is its own signifier…)? Or was it some kind of punishment? I’M SO CONFUSED.
This is a really standard part of most high schools’ health curriculum, actually. You and a partner share a robot baby for several days–it cries at random times, you have to get up and “feed” it or change its diaper or whatever. Basically, it’s an updated version of the thing they used to do where you had to carry around an egg for several days without breaking or losing it. It’s an (admittedly silly) representation of how much work babies are and how disruptive they can be to your daily schedule, ostensibly so people won’t get pregnant as teenagers.
The irony in this instance being, of course, that this girl was going to have a real live baby in the near future, making the “babies are inconvenient, don’t have them” message kind of beside the point.
Oh! I am familiar with the practice, I was just confused because the way it’s written it seems like ONLY the pregnant girl had one and that seemed like a cruel joke.
Yeah, I had to read the sentence over a few times. I think it is a cruel joke, in a sort of cosmic way, but I didn’t interpret it as her being singled out.
As with most things, I had a mental flash to 10 Things I Hate About You:
“Who knocked up your sister?”
oh god, I’m giving them ideas.
Unrelated to this post, but I’d like to hear about more things that make you think of 10 Things I Hate About You.
The replies are correct. The animatronic baby was a requirement for a family health class; it was just a weird sick coincidence that a girl in the class was actually pregnant. The point is that it was absurd to make her also participate in that exercise. Sorry for being unclear!
This article is great, and it’s interesting to see this kind of perspective on him–but it doesn’t mention one of his most blatant and reoccuring problems which is his really awful fatphobia. I have to say, I understand how powerful it can be to be exposed to sex-positive education for the first time, and that’s hugely valuable, but Dan Savage is a jerk and I’m grateful that there are now so many other online resources that aren’t so insulting and insensitive.
This is my main problem with him at this point in time. He’s recanted a bunch of the other problematic things he’s said in the past, but seems to be holding onto his mantra of “if your body changes in any way after your relationship begins, your partner has the right to dump you without warning, because you’re not maintaining the standard of appearance they have come to expect.” (tl;dr: If you gain any weight, for any reason, expect to be foreveralone.)
yeah, this is my problem. I appreciate he’s been good and helpful for a lot of people, but the thigns he’s said about bi people and fat people haven’t just offended me, but have fed into the idea that I am somehow unworthy and unloveable for them.
And I reserve the right to avoid him as a result.
That is a very good point and I’m embarrassed that I neglected it here. Whenever weight is an issue in a relationship, Dan’s go-to response is that the fat partner needs to be cajoled into losing weight. Dan has several scientific beliefs that are not empirically supported and are just really problematic: the first being his worship of evolutionary psychology, the second being his belief that weight is a result of eating and exercise alone.
I loved the article and thought it was really well written–it’s good for me to read something like that because I spend a lot of time gleefully hating on Dan Savage and writing off what he’s accomplished.
I came down here to say “Also please let’s not forget that Dan Savage hates fat people” so I’m thrilled to see it’s already been addressed (and by the author no less! Thanks, Erika!)
Savage has an antipathy for women’s bodies in general which he only occasionally manages to conceal. It’s not even that he’s not attracted to women, he finds them aesthetically revolting.
Yes! His infamous claim that a vagina resembles “a canned ham dropped from a great height”. And when people call him out on finding female bodies unattractive and disgusting, he says “of course I do! I’m gay!” which is super cissexist, and implies that all gay men are gynophobes like him, which is just silly.
Yup. As a fat woman, it’s very clear that he’d like me not to exist at all, which HUGELY hurts because his column was so INCREDIBLY helpful when I was a younger person. But it’s very clearly directed at very specific people, and those people don’t include me, since he thinks it’s totes cool for strangers to go up to fat people in public and yell at them for eating food.
Dan Savage inadvertently sparked my conversion to fat acceptance many years ago, before that was even a well-known term! I was reading one of his first books and in it, he rants and rails in the most dehumanizing, violent way about some fat people he sees swimming in a hotel pool – for several paragraphs! It disturbed me so profoundly that I had to put the book down. Later I realized why: I was reading hate speech. It’s been hard for me to truly laud him since, though I know he has done so much good in other areas. To this day, fat remains a really hard subject for him…
I really liked this article, but there’s a point you made that genuinely confused me: “conspicuously, almost every caller on his podcast is white.” How do you know that?
Special glasses that allow you to see through the sound waves.
If they sound “white,” they must be white! Just like on NPR!
I suck.
I should have said that race is another blind spot on the podcast. It’s only come up, I think, two or three times in the entire course of the show. Twice it has been white people asking Dan for validation on their race-based partner preferences (sometimes he validates it, sometimes he shames it), and one time a black woman called in asking if it was okay to have a slavery fetish (Dan said yes). I of course do not know the race of the callers and that was a dumb thing to say. Thank you for calling me out on it.
You just misspoke, no worries. Thanks for clearing it up!
(I am intrigued by the idea of sound-wave glasses.)
“We each received a treasure chest, and were asked to imagine it represented our virginity.”
I am horrified that you are not kidding.
At our school (northern Colorado) the “pregnancy crisis center” lady brought in a condom wrapper and observed that it had a warning label… just like cigarettes. I wasn’t sure what I’d just experienced was actually real so unfortunately I only called bullshit after class had ended. She seemed genuinely contrite about it, like she knew it was crazy but had to do it.
Later on we got some wonderfully droll college frosh women from Planned Parenthood who gave a universally better presentation (obviously) and made dick jokes as they demonstrated condom application on a banana. Good times. The state legislature fought for a long time to keep PP out of the schools, I don’t know if they’ve succeeded since.
Dan Savage does not need defending.
Seconding forever
My working title for this was “An Unnecessary Apologia for Dan Savage”. But really, it’s more of an exploration of my mixed feelings for the guy and the impact his work has had.I would never argue that someone should consume his work if they already have scruples with it. It’s not like he’s hard up.
I appreciate that bit of metadata. I had a strong negative response to your post, tbh. I didn’t want to respond hostilely to the personal essay side of it, but I am pretty hostile towards Savage. Thanks for your comment.
Thanks for this article. I’ve been struggling lately with my response when writers/personalities/artists etc. do problematic things but I still genuinely enjoy their work. Is it enough to recognize and identify problems but still consume the work? Should I cut myself off from things that I bring me joy because of other people? Am I morally deficient for not automatically hating said work?
I know these are all things that people need to decide for themselves, but lately it seems like I’m just feeling guilty all the time for the things I like. (Mostly I’m talking about video games and video game related media like Game Grumps or Achievement Hunter here.) Does anyone else struggle with this kind of thing? Like, “If I were a better person, I would stop playing this game or watching this video the moment anyone says anything offensive, but I’m enjoying myself too much to stop” type of guilt.
I have this struggle as well. My issues with Savage aren’t enough to keep me from enjoying his content, but they are sizable enough that I don’t financially support him: I don’t buy the “magnum” editions of his podcast, and I don’t buy his books. That’s where I generally draw the line for problematic shit, but that’s probably just a lame way of justifying my consumption to myself.
My worry comes from a slightly different angle: in a case like Savage Love, how much does continuing to consume this media lead to internalizing/reinforcing for myself the bad stuff? Am I increasing the amount of fatphobia inside my head with each episode, even if my internal monologue is pushing back each time it comes up?
Oh man, THIS, especially this week with R. Kelly.
This article might build on those thoughts for you. http://opineseason.com/2013/07/08/when-you-hate-t…
One way that I, personally, deal with that issue is by discussing what I like about shows/books/movies/etc and what I find problematic and why. There’s a lot of stuff I’m super into and really enjoy that also has ISSUES and I am VERY willing to dissect these issues and discuss them with other people. So it makes it clear that there’s an audience for this stuff, but that audience (or some of them anyway) are eager for stuff that’s less racist/sexist/homobphobic/ablist/whatever.
There’s a handful of things that I just… I can’t enjoy it because the negative element has become too strong. (the fat hatred/jokes/etc in “Parks and Rec” are heading that way for me… the constant Jerry bullying really bugs me! I also haven’t seen the most recent season). But I don’t avoid them out of guilt, I avoid them because the bad outweighed teh good.
It’s ok to like stuff that has problems and flaws! If we only liked perfect things we’d be miserable and completely unfilfilled. But you as a consumer have a lot of power! You have a voice! Discuss what you like and why… but criticize is thoughtfully too! It’s great and can be a lot of fun.
I come at Dan Savage from the same place as Erika– I was an earnest flaming liberal teenaged girl in a rural town outside of Seattle, and on Sunday nights, I’d wield the antenna of my Sony cassette deck, trying to pick up KCMU to listen to Dan and Mary Martone discuss sex, politics, relationships, and religion from 9-11pm. When my high school had a daycare in a portable out back because of how many pregnant or parenting teens we had (and abstinence only was of COURSE the sex ed of choice), I was doling out advice to friends on lube and anal sex (not that I was getting anywhere near the need for either with my awkward haircut and Ani DiFranco t-shirts, but band geeks are an experimental bunch and I knew a lot).
18 years later, I’ve met Dan, I’ve pitched in on guest-answering a column (with the rest of the Slog Happy Hour attendees), and I’ve gained critical thinking skills and the knowledge that my high-school idols aren’t perfect and are often very flawed individuals. I think that Dan offers a powerful and valuable resource for people who want information presented in a certain way, but I also think that he has a huge blind spot when it comes to abuse survivors, weight, and the perspective of cis women and trans* people. But I still owe him the fact that I never returned to a sexual partner who didn’t make an attempt to get me off, that I was able to knowledgeably shoot down the beloved “I smoked stems and seeds so I’m sterile” bullshit excuse to avoid condoms that seemed to be weirdly popular in the dipshit circles I ran in, and that I refused to fake it for anyone, because I deserve an orgasm and you don’t deserve false praise for something you didn’t do.
God, band geeks. The cult of Bacchus.
I liked your article, except for “conspicuously, almost every caller on his podcast is white.” There is no way you could possibly know anything about whether this is true. Savage himself has said he knows little to nothing about his callers except for their age, sex, and orientation (i.e. what most people start their calls with).
Erika clarified that above, under hey_lady’s comment. Valid point.
Hmm. I haven’t listened to Dan Savage that much or read a whole lot of what he’s written (that is, I’m no expert), and while I DO think that he’s done a lot of good stuff (real sex education! sex positivity! speaking up for what you want! not everyone is straight!) and his work has been influential/eye-opening for some of my friends, but I have personally had a really hard time with several things, particularly his fatphobia (as mentioned above) and how he talks about asexual people (whether directly, implicitly, or just in terms of people wanting/not wanting sex). Obviously this has a lot to do with my own hangups/brain/pants, but as a Confused Young Thing (Who Hadn’t Figured Out Asexuality) I had a lot of trouble with his implication (or at least, what I perceived to be his implication) that everybody wants sex and if they don’t there’s something wrong with them, and everyone should be willing to do anything/anyone. (Maybe that was just me being a Confused and Delicate Flower!) I am also realizing as I write this that I haven’t heard/read anything by him in a long time and that I have come a long way from being a Confused Young Thing, but my impression of him has always kind of been that he would think that I was weird, wrong, and not giving enough because I’m not into sex.
And with that, I’m going to go read up on him some more and hopefully be able to offer better comments. Also maybe try to talk about things besides asexuality.
Excellent article! Thank you for sharing. Although I come from a different universe of experience, I have both similar doubts and a similar, practical sort of affection for Savage.
I often agree with Dan Savage when it comes to ethics/etiquette (Do I tell Partner A that I’m having sex with Partner B? Is okay to not come home for Christmas if my parents are homophobic assholes? How can I start a conversation about X without making my partner feel alienated?) but his blatant misogyny is just too much for me. And his “every man watches porn – DEAL WITH IT” stance is just tiring at this point.
I think what bothers me about a lot of sex podcasts (Sex Nerd Sandra, Savage Love, etc) is that sometimes it feels like they’re teaching listeners how to put up with sex acts that they don’t actually like? And that just makes me feel icky. Like, “oh, you don’t like anal? YOU’RE JUST DOING IT WRONG, YOU’LL LIKE IT I SWEAR AND IF YOU LOVE YOUR PARTNER YOU’LL TRY IT.”
I liked Dan Savage for a long time, read his column, listened to the podcast, even read slog when I was bored. But after a certain point in listening to the podcast the fuckups seemed less like foot-in-mouth anomalies and more like instances in which he voiced his actual opinion against his better judgment (it doesn’t help that he’s probably stoned during most tapings, but really if you’re recording for hours why wouldn’t you be).
It’s inarguable that the man’s done some good, particularly in circumventing the church-industrial complex that local governments contract to cover sex ed in schools and (especially) in decoupling kink from popular notions of mental illness / deviance / leftist performance art. With that said, he has numerous shortcomings (to put them softly) that have mostly been covered above. Most concerning to me, especially given his otherwise principled construction of sex, is the fact that when it comes to radical consent, he’s incredulous. Especially in long-term couplings but in other cases too.
I stopped listening to the podcast after an episode in which a woman called in having not voiced consent during sex and felt violated afterwards, and Dan walked himself up the “it’s your own fault” trail before audibly catching himself careening toward that precipice and made concluding statements that were more or less in direct contradiction to everything he’d just said. Up to that point I’d been increasingly irritated with his shock jock ass-covering, saying something about rape or bisexuals or fat people and saying “I’m going to get so many letters about this” in that withering here come the PC police tone. It’s a wink to the audience, like “we know I’m right, but we’ll get through this”. He concluded the call with that hedge and I said fuck it.
By and large it’s Dan Savage’s brand of sex-positivism that precipitates something like the “sex critical” rhetoric espoused by Sarah Nicole Prickett and others (which is itself marred by a weird fun house inversion of church-bound natural law borne from its embrace of false consciousness, and a wholesale rejection of consent from Dworkin). Once you separate Savage’s broader beliefs about sexuality from the education he provides on the mechanics of sex and STIs (things that people ought to be tought anyway) it starts out fairly agreeable and becomes less so the deeper you get into it. He’s the authority we have but we honestly deserve better.
We deserve so much better. If the only other option is the American Taliban, yeah. I guess I can see the appeal. But his overall message to straight women seems to be:
a) your body is viscerally disgusting
b) you’ll take it up the ass and like it, and
c) if you expect fidelity, you are a frigid moron.
So I really have a hard time appreciating his good side.
I liked Dan Savage for a long time, read his column, listened to the podcast, even read slog when I was bored. But after a certain point in listening to the podcast the fuckups seemed less like foot-in-mouth anomalies and more like instances in which he voiced his actual opinion against his better judgment (it doesn't help that he's probably stoned during most tapings, but really if you're recording for hours why wouldn't you be).
It's inarguable that the man's done some good, particularly in circumventing the church-industrial complex that local governments contract to cover sex ed in schools and (especially) in decoupling kink from popular notions of mental illness / deviance / leftist performance art. With that said, he has numerous shortcomings (to put them softly) that have mostly been covered above. Most concerning to me, especially given his otherwise principled construction of sex, is the fact that when it comes to radical consent, he's incredulous. Especially in long-term couplings but in other cases too.
I stopped listening to the podcast after an episode in which a woman called in having not voiced consent during sex and felt violated afterwards, and Dan walked himself up the "it's your own fault" trail before audibly catching himself careening toward that precipice and made concluding statements that were more or less in direct contradiction to everything he'd just said. Up to that point I'd been increasingly irritated with his shock jock ass-covering, saying something about rape or bisexuals or fat people and saying "I'm going to get so many letters about this" in that withering here come the PC police tone. It's a wink to the audience, like "we know I'm right, but we'll get through this". He concluded the call with that hedge and I said fuck it.
By and large it's Dan Savage's brand of sex-positivism that precipitates something like the "sex critical" rhetoric espoused by Sarah Nicole Prickett and others (which is itself marred by a weird fun house inversion of church-bound natural law borne from its embrace of false consciousness, and a wholesale rejection of consent from Dworkin). Once you separate Savage's broader beliefs about sexuality from the education he provides on the mechanics of sex and STIs (things that people ought to be tought anyway) it starts out fairly agreeable and becomes less so the deeper you get into it. He's the authority we have but we honestly deserve better.
At our school (northern Colorado) the "pregnancy crisis center" lady brought in a condom wrapper and observed that it had a warning label… just like cigarettes. I wasn't sure what I'd just experienced was actually real so unfortunately I only called bullshit after class had ended. She seemed genuinely contrite about it, like she knew it was crazy but had to do it.
Later on we got some wonderfully droll college frosh women from Planned Parenthood who gave a universally better presentation (obviously) and made dick jokes as they demonstrated condom application on a banana. Good times. The state legislature fought for a long time to keep PP out of the schools, I don't know if they've succeeded since.
Ugh this resonates with me so much. I got a lot of my sex ed from him and shared it with my friends to the point that I became a mini-Savage sex ed authority within our teen circle. I’m grateful that he was syndicated in the Onion for teens to find (past all the escort ads too) but now as an adult with critical thinking skills and general activist community savvy, I almost feel embarrassed that I ever endorsed him. This makes me feel a bit better about it, but I certainly wouldn’t give him as much credit as you do.
This is probably the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say about Dan Savage.
He gets a lot of well-deserved criticism for sure, but what I find fascinating is the back-and-forth relationship he has with his readers and listeners on a lot of the tricky territory he finds himself in, and how you can’t really talk about Dan Savage without someone saying “okay, but he’s wrong on X…” which seems like a valuable contribution to the dialogue in and of itself.
It’s also tough because I think a lot of his biggest fuck-ups come from his inability to recognize nuance where nuance exists, but I also think if he was the kind of guy who got bogged down in nuance, he would not be nearly as good of an entertainer. The catch phrases and strong opinions are part of the appeal. So it’s a slightly shitty, you gotta take the good with the bad sort of thing.
This is probably the most sensible thing I have ever heard anyone say about Dan Savage.
He gets a lot of well-deserved criticism for sure, but what I find fascinating is the back-and-forth relationship he has with his readers and listeners on a lot of the tricky territory he finds himself in, and how you can't really talk about Dan Savage without someone saying "okay, but he's wrong on X…" which seems like a valuable contribution to the dialogue in and of itself.
It's also tough because I think a lot of his biggest fuck-ups come from his inability to recognize nuance where nuance exists, but I also think if he was the kind of guy who got bogged down in nuance, he would not be nearly as good of an entertainer. The catch phrases and strong opinions are part of the appeal. So it's a slightly shitty, you gotta take the good with the bad sort of thing.